"They also live / Who swerve and vanish in the river."--Archibald MacLeish

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Soylent Green

Finally saw this, thirty-five years (?) after it came out. I remember hearing about it as a kid, and realizing, without exactly being told, that I was not allowed to see it. Two astonishing things right off:* They talk about the "greenhouse effect," and talk about it like it's old news.* It's a pretty good movie.The downsides of the movie are the usual treatment of women as belongings ("furniture"), meant to show "how shockingly badly women are treated in the dystopian future" but really meant as a slap to contemporary feminism and a fantasy for neanderthal 70s men; also the always enigmatic presence of Charlton Heston, representing a protestor against the ghastly future his real-life politics would bring about. In these old films I watch him speak in sentences, and move more or less as a person moves, and wonder how and when his mind snapped like a brittle twig. Is he just acting like a normal human who is an actor?

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About Me

I'm a writer, editor, and recovering academic. My first novel, Bigfoot and the Baby, was published by Bona Fide Books in June 2014. You can also read my work in Alaska Quarterly Review, Crazyhorse, Flavorwire, Slush Pile, The Millions, The Rumpus.net, Tin House, and elsewhere. Represented by Cynthia Zigmund.

Borrowed Fire

Borrowed Fire is a (now intermittent) series in which I read classic works of literature and try to point out what contemporary writers can learn from their craft. All BF texts are posted on Project Gutenberg--so you can follow along, even if you haven't read the book!